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Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

CAMike

Well-Known Member
None
Contributor
A very similar scenario occurred in the Perry Class Frigate Initial Build:
Minimum Man Concept: FAIL (20% shortfall)
Lighter Weight: Vertical Stress Cracks near the XO's stateroom. Big Navy shortened the ship to save money immediately before production. Aluminum super structure welded to 1/2' think steel hull.
The more things change, the more they say the same.
 

Max the Mad Russian

Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
Just another point of view: cruiser is something more maintanable by her own crew than the DDG, and amount of battle damages that can be fixed and controlled by her own DCFP team(s) is more impressive. That is the way Russian Navy sees the difference in classification rather than two areas/one area for fighting. Sometimes cruiser can provide the equipment and/or personnell to help the DDG and all smaller to cope with battle or other damages. For short, you cannot knock the cruiser out as easy as the smaller ships.
 

Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
http://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/the-355-ship-fleet-will-take-decades-billions-to-build-analysts/

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/the-355-ship-fleet-navy-wants-even-more-ships-than-trump-pledged/

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/04/no-mans-sea-csbas-lethal-vision-of-future-naval-war/ (Great article)

WASHINGTON: Mr. Trump, we’ll see your campaign pledge of a 350-ship fleet and raise you five vessels, the US Navy effectively said this morning. The long-anticipated Force Structure Assessment calls for a fleet of 355 ships to counter “a growing China and a resurgent Russia,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced today. That’s almost 14 percent higher than the Navy’s previous goal of 308 ships, set back in 2014, and almost 30 percent higher than the fleet’s actual size today, 275. The largest category of growth? Nuclear-powered attack submarines, considered the stealthy capital ships of future war zones too lethal for surface vessels. This is the first increase in the goal for subs since 2004, noted a pleased Rep. Joe Courtney, top Democrat on the House seapower subcommittee, and it’s a doozy: from 48 boats to 66.
 
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Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
Out today - brutal review of the USS Zumwalt
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443165/zumwalt-class-navy-stealth-destroyer-program-failure

Adding insult to injury, absolutely no one has been held accountable for this budget-busting debacle. In fact, every one of the Navy’s four original project managers were almost immediately promoted from captain to admiral upon completing their stint in charge. And the lead contractors for the Zumwalt program — Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — have received additional hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts — even as costs soared, schedules slipped, and capabilities declined.

Still, senior Navy leadership was determined to push minimal-manning and eventually the design team was forced to accept a crew size of 147 crew members, not including the air detachment. Even with that increase, there is no way the Zumwalt can conduct the kind of sustained up-tempo operations one expects from a major surface combatant. And there is no chance it can conduct the kind of ship-saving and recovery operations that a Navy warship of this size should be able to execute after taking major damage. That is, if the Zumwalt suffers major damage, hull breaches, etc., its chances of survival are far less than past Navy warships of a similar size; it simply will not have enough crew members to do what is needed to save the ship. Perhaps most astonishingly, at one point Navy leadership got so extreme about reducing crew size, it even pushed to eliminate the ship’s cook. In lieu of freshly prepared meals, the Zumwalt would put out to sea with pre-prepared meals that the crew could warm up for themselves.

No cook or fresh meals?
 

Griz882

Frightening children with the Griz-O-Copter!
pilot
Contributor
No cook or fresh meals?
The army got rid of field cooks years ago. Everything I ate (outside a FOB or LSA) in Iraq or Afghanistan was out of a boiled tin container or a plastic bag.

I am more concerned about the crew size. I was on Knox Class frigates and we had a crew of 257 all in. The Zumwalt ship is a lot larger than the old single screw buckets I served on.
 

Pags

N/A
pilot
Out today - brutal review of the USS Zumwalt
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443165/zumwalt-class-navy-stealth-destroyer-program-failure

Adding insult to injury, absolutely no one has been held accountable for this budget-busting debacle. In fact, every one of the Navy’s four original project managers were almost immediately promoted from captain to admiral upon completing their stint in charge. And the lead contractors for the Zumwalt program — Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — have received additional hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts — even as costs soared, schedules slipped, and capabilities declined.

Still, senior Navy leadership was determined to push minimal-manning and eventually the design team was forced to accept a crew size of 147 crew members, not including the air detachment. Even with that increase, there is no way the Zumwalt can conduct the kind of sustained up-tempo operations one expects from a major surface combatant. And there is no chance it can conduct the kind of ship-saving and recovery operations that a Navy warship of this size should be able to execute after taking major damage. That is, if the Zumwalt suffers major damage, hull breaches, etc., its chances of survival are far less than past Navy warships of a similar size; it simply will not have enough crew members to do what is needed to save the ship. Perhaps most astonishingly, at one point Navy leadership got so extreme about reducing crew size, it even pushed to eliminate the ship’s cook. In lieu of freshly prepared meals, the Zumwalt would put out to sea with pre-prepared meals that the crew could warm up for themselves.

No cook or fresh meals?
The notion of accountability for cost exceedances is a bit silly. USN isn't building a house wherein all the costs are known and understood. Instead USN is building a cutting edge warship with new technologies. After 50+ hulls of Burkes the costs are understood but a new build ship has lots of unknowns that are a direct result of the technology that has been incorporated. If the Fleet wants cutting edge it's going to cost a lot. If the fleet wants cost control it's going to get lots of Burkes. Should USN have pursued an incremental ship building policy and limited the variables? In hindsight; probably. But "transformational" was what was wanted in the case of DDG-1000 and LCS.

Also, most meals these days are precooked and the CSs heat them up. There's not a lot of actual cooking that goes on in the galley these days.
 

azguy

Well-Known Member
None
The notion of accountability for cost exceedances is a bit silly. USN isn't building a house wherein all the costs are known and understood. Instead USN is building a cutting edge warship with new technologies. After 50+ hulls of Burkes the costs are understood but a new build ship has lots of unknowns that are a direct result of the technology that has been incorporated. If the Fleet wants cutting edge it's going to cost a lot. If the fleet wants cost control it's going to get lots of Burkes. Should USN have pursued an incremental ship building policy and limited the variables? In hindsight; probably. But "transformational" was what was wanted in the case of DDG-1000 and LCS.

+100

The issue of massive cost overruns isn't at all unique to DDG-1000, nor is it unique to LCS, JSF, FORD, etc. The notion that we should hold O-6s accountable for cost overruns (as suggested in the article quoted above) is totally insane. There are deep rooted structural issues at work here. I have a beltway tour under my belt and I won't pretend for a second that I have any real grasp of said issues or how to realistically fix them.
 

Pags

N/A
pilot
+100

The issue of massive cost overruns isn't at all unique to DDG-1000, nor is it unique to LCS, JSF, FORD, etc. The notion that we should hold O-6s accountable for cost overruns (as suggested in the article quoted above) is totally insane. There are deep rooted structural issues at work here. I have a beltway tour under my belt and I won't pretend for a second that I have any real grasp of said issues or how to realistically fix them.
I'm not sure how you "fix" the fact that predicting costs associated with R&D is hard. No one has done "it", where it is JSF, LCS, etc, before so no one knows how hard it's going to be. You don't know where the issues are going to crop up or how hard it is going to be to fix them. You might as well ask someone to predict the winning lotto number.
 

azguy

Well-Known Member
None
I'm not sure how you "fix" the fact that predicting costs associated with R&D is hard. No one has done "it", where it is JSF, LCS, etc, before so no one knows how hard it's going to be. You don't know where the issues are going to crop up or how hard it is going to be to fix them. You might as well ask someone to predict the winning lotto number.

One thing is for certain - we have a perfect track record of grossly under assessing cost in our highest tier acquisition programs.
 

Hair Warrior

Well-Known Member
Contributor
I'm not sure how you "fix" the fact that predicting costs associated with R&D is hard. No one has done "it", where it is JSF, LCS, etc, before so no one knows how hard it's going to be. You don't know where the issues are going to crop up or how hard it is going to be to fix them. You might as well ask someone to predict the winning lotto number.
You could "fix" it through a Wall Street technique known as dollar-cost averaging. Buy one ship at $100, the second at $90, and the third at $80, and you've just lowered your average price per unit by 10% overall on a 3 ship procurement.

It's a risky acquisition strategy that requires an all-in mentality coupled with big budgets, minimal redesign, and successful follow-through to generate cost efficiencies... which isn't always a guarantee. We're doing it right now with the F-35.
 

BigRed389

Registered User
None
You could "fix" it through a Wall Street technique known as dollar-cost averaging. Buy one ship at $100, the second at $90, and the third at $80, and you've just lowered your average price per unit by 10% overall on a 3 ship procurement.

It's a risky acquisition strategy that requires an all-in mentality coupled with big budgets, minimal redesign, and successful follow-through to generate cost efficiencies... which isn't always a guarantee. We're doing it right now with the F-35.

Those are a lot of buzzwords, but I have no idea how that actually is supposed to let you lower (or better predict) R&D costs.

Or how you can arbitrarily just lower buying price for each successive unit...the contractor gets a say. There are already alternatives used like Multi Year Procurement, if the intent is to generate cost efficiencies over time.

And procurement cost doesn't behave like stocks over time, other than the raw material costs that go into them on the supply side.
 
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Hair Warrior

Well-Known Member
Contributor
Right. It doesn't always work. Costs typically go down because the RDT&E is a sunk cost and not a variable cost. Thus, sunk cost only applies to the first ship in a class, and successive ships benefit from streamlining the process after the kinks are largely eliminated. But theory doesn't always translate to practice. And it goes without saying that you can't gain efficiencies if you stop building more ships after the first one.
 

Pags

N/A
pilot
You could "fix" it through a Wall Street technique known as dollar-cost averaging. Buy one ship at $100, the second at $90, and the third at $80, and you've just lowered your average price per unit by 10% overall on a 3 ship procurement.

It's a risky acquisition strategy that requires an all-in mentality coupled with big budgets, minimal redesign, and successful follow-through to generate cost efficiencies... which isn't always a guarantee. We're doing it right now with the F-35.
What @BigRed389 said. How does this help predict how much an acquisition program, which is usually made up of more than one new technologies with their own unknown cost, is going to cost?

In acquisitions, if you buy a lot of something after a Full Rate Production (FRP) decision your price/widget will go down. But you need to buy a lot of them and after FRP the configuration is usually fairly consistent. But prior to FRP you're doing EMD and LRIP buys of lower quantities of widgets that may not necessarily be the same thing that you buy at FRP.

To put it in terms of "normal human purchases," the DoD is NOT buying Camries and Accords. The DoD is asking a car manufacturer to make them a custom vehicle using technologies that have never been used before. So imagine what your cost would be if you decided an off the lot lambo isn't good enough for you. And the off the shelf mod kits that go with the ready made vehicle aren't good enough either. So instead you're going to ask Ferrari and Lamborghini to make your supercar vision a reality. And put some new lasers on it and make it be able to talk to your 1980s Beta VCR. So not only are you paying for the technology to make the materials, and the new space age material, and the lasers, and the backward compatibility with 1980s tech; you're also paying for all the smart (read expensive) engineers to make this dream a reality. Or, if cars aren't your thing, instead of building the house from the builders portfolio you've asked for a custom floorplan. Made out of carbon fibre and titanium. With some lasers on the top.
 

BigRed389

Registered User
None
Right. It doesn't always work. Costs typically go down because the RDT&E is a sunk cost and not a variable cost. Thus, sunk cost only applies to the first ship in a class, and successive ships benefit from streamlining the process after the kinks are largely eliminated. But theory doesn't always translate to practice. And it goes without saying that you can't gain efficiencies if you stop building more ships after the first one.

No, it's not that it doesn't work, it's that you're confusing between several different concepts.

There are plenty of examples of successful programs where production cost has gone down over time.

What @BigRed389 said. How does this help predict how much an acquisition program, which is usually made up of more than one new technologies with their own unknown cost, is going to cost?

In acquisitions, if you buy a lot of something after a Full Rate Production (FRP) decision your price/widget will go down. But you need to buy a lot of them and after FRP the configuration is usually fairly consistent. But prior to FRP you're doing EMD and LRIP buys of lower quantities of widgets that may not necessarily be the same thing that you buy at FRP.

To put it in terms of "normal human purchases," the DoD is NOT buying Camries and Accords. The DoD is asking a car manufacturer to make them a custom vehicle using technologies that have never been used before. So imagine what your cost would be if you decided an off the lot lambo isn't good enough for you. And the off the shelf mod kits that go with the ready made vehicle aren't good enough either. So instead you're going to ask Ferrari and Lamborghini to make your supercar vision a reality. And put some new lasers on it and make it be able to talk to your 1980s Beta VCR. So not only are you paying for the technology to make the materials, and the new space age material, and the lasers, and the backward compatibility with 1980s tech; you're also paying for all the smart (read expensive) engineers to make this dream a reality. Or, if cars aren't your thing, instead of building the house from the builders portfolio you've asked for a custom floorplan. Made out of carbon fibre and titanium. With some lasers on the top.

What he said.
R&D is hard. Some corporate buzzwords aren't going to make hard science and engineering any easier.

And there have been relatively successful ACAT I programs that didn't horribly bust their RDT&E budget.
 
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